AP Psychology Unit 1 Key People and Terms History and Approaches

Case Study

A case study is among the oldest research methods. It examines one individual or group in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles-things true of all of us.

Dependent Variable

A dependent variable is the outcome factor. It is the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable. It can vary depending on what takes place during the experiment.

Double-Blind Procedure

A double-blind procedure is an experimental procedure in which both the research participants and the research staff are blind, or unaware, of whether a particular participant received the treatment or a placebo. This procedure is commonly used in drug-evaluation studies.

Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a testable prediction, often implied or produced by a good theory. These predictions specify what results would support the theory and what results would contradict the theory.

Normal Curve

A normal curve is a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many types of data. Most scores fall near the mean; about 68% falls within one standard deviation of it. Fewer and fewer fall near the extremes.

Random Sample

A random sample is a sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion. Every person in the entire group has an equal chance of participating.

Survey

A survey is a technique for obtaining the self-reported attitudes or behaviors of a particular group. It is usually done by questioning a representative, random sample of the group.

Theory

A theory is an explanation that uses a set of principles to organize observations and predict behaviors or events. In other words, a theory explains behaviors or events by offering ideas that organize what we have observed.

Independent Variable

An independent variable is the experimental factor that is manipulated. It is the variable whose effect is being studied. We can vary it independently of other factors.

Aristotle

Aristotle lived rom 384-322 B.C.E in ancient Greece. He was the student of Plato, but unlike his teacher, he believed that knowledge is not preexisting. He said knowledge grows from the experiences in our memories. He derived principles from careful observations and data.

Francis Bacon

Bacon lived from 1561-1626 in Britain. He became one of the founders of modern science and he has influenced even today's experiments of psychological science. He anticipated that the mind wants to perceive patterns, order, and equality even in events where there is none. He also predicted that people notice and remember events that confirm their beliefs.

Basic Research

Basic research is pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base. Some psychologists conduct basic research to build psychology's knowledge base.

Behavioral Psychology

Behavioral psychology is the study of observable behavior and its explanation by principles of learning. A behavioral psychologist might attempt to discover which external stimuli trigger a certain responses or act.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the view that psychology should be an objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes. The behaviorists were one of the two major forces in psychology until the 1960's. Today, most research psychologists agree that psychology should be a objective science but not that it should study behavior without reference to mental processes.

Biological Psychology

Biological psychology is the study of the connection between biological processes, like genetic, neural, or hormonal processes, and psychological processes. A biological psychologist might study brain circuits or how heredity and experience influence our individual differences.

Mary Whiton Calkins

Calkins was admitted into William James' graduate seminar at Harvard in 1890. When she joined, all the other students dropped out, so James tutored her alone. She finished all the requirements for a Harvard Ph.D. and outscored all the male students on the qualifying exams, but Harvard still denied her the degree. She went on and became a distinguished memory researcher and the American Psychological Association's (APA) first female president in 1905.

Kenneth Clark

Clark, who lived from 1914-2005, was a social psychologist. He researched evidence of internalized racism., which is caused by stigmatization. He did an experiment with dolls and found that African American children chose to play with white dolls. He was the first black president of the APA.

Clinical Psychology

Clinical psychology studies, asses, and treats people with psychological disorders, like mental, emotional, and behavior disorders. Clinical psychologists administer and interpret tests, provide counseling and therapy, and sometimes conduct base and applied research.

Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with cognition, which includes perception, thinking, memory, and language. It has enriched our understanding of the brain activity underlying mental activity. It has also given us new ways to understanding ourselves and treating disorders such as depression.

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of all the mental activities involved in thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. It focuses on how we encode, process, store, and retrieve information. A cognitive psychologist might study how our interpretation of a situation affects our feelings and how our feeling affect our thinking.

Counseling Psychology

Counseling psychology helps people to cope with challenges and crises, including academic, vocational, and marital issues. It helps to improve their personal and social functioning and achieve greater well-being.

Culture

Culture is the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. It influences things like our standards of promptness and our tendency to be casual or formal.

Charles Darwin

Darwin was an evolutionary theorist who greatly influenced the philosopher-psychologist William James and the idea of functionalism. He believed that traits like smelling or thinking developed because it contributed to our ancestors' survival-it was adaptive. He was the author of "On the Origin of Species" and proposed the idea of natural selection.

René Descartes

Descartes, who lived from 1595-1650, was a French philosopher and scientist. He agreed with Socrates and Plato that ideas are innate and the mind is distinct from the body and able to survive on its own. This concept caused Descartes to wonder how the mind and physical body communicate. He dissected animals and concluded that the fluid in the brain's cavities are animals spirits, which move from the brain, through hollow nerves, and to muscles, which causes movement. Experiences opened pores in the brain which animal spirits flowed into and formed memories.

Developmental Psychology

Developmental Psychology is the study of physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span. Developmental psychologists study humans' changing abilities from birth to death.

Dorthea Dix

Dix was a pioneer of therapy and a reformer who led the way for humane treatment of people with psychological disorders. She successfully convinced lawmakers to construct and fund asylums for the mentally ill.

Educational Psychology

Educational psychology is the study of how psychological processes affect and ca enhance learning and teaching. Educational psychologists study influences on teaching and learning.

E.B. Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener, a student of Wundt, received his Ph.D. in 1892 and joined the Cornell University faculty. He introduced the idea of structuralism. He attempted to discover the structural elements of the mind by engaging people in self-reflective introspection.

Empiricism

Empiricism is the idea that what we know comes from experience and that scientific knowledge is enabled by observation and experimentation. Empiricism was formed by the ideas of John Locke and Francis Bacon.

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is the study of the evolution of behavior and the mind. It uses principles of natural selection. It focuses on how the natural selection of traits has promoted the survival of genes. An evolutionary psychologist might analyze how certain feelings facilitated the survival of our ancestors' genes.

Sigmund Freud

Freud emphasized the ways emotional responses to childhood experiences and our unconscious thought processes affect our behavior. This can also be referred to as Freudian psychology. He is one of the most famous psychologist who held some controversial ideas.

Functionalism

Functionalism is the idea that thinking developed because it contributed to our ancestor's survival. Consciousness it functional because it enables us to consider our past, adjust to our present, and plan our future. It was promoted by William James and influenced by Charles Darwin.

G. Stanley Hall

G. Stanley Hall was an American student of Wilhelm Wundt. He established the first formal United States psychology laboratory at John Hopkins University in 1883.

Human Factors Psychology

Human factors psychology is a subdivision of industrial-organizational psychology that focuses on the interaction of people, machines, and physical environments. It explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use.

Humanistic Pscychology

Humanistic psychology says that a person's growth potential can be nurtured or limited by current environmental influences. It also draws attention to the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied. These concepts were focused on, rather than the meaning of early childhood memories or the learning of conditioned responses.

Industrial-Organizational Psychology

I/O Psychology uses psychology concepts and methods in the workplace to help organizations and companies select and train employees, boost morale and productivity, design products, and implement systems.

Experimental Group

In an experiment, the experimental group is the group that is exposed to the treatment, or one version of the independent variable.

Informed Consent

Informed consent is an ethical principle that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they want to participate. It is one of the ethical principles developed by the APA and by psychologists internationally.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist. He pioneered the study of learning. He experimented with applying stimuli to dogs and was able to make them salivate even without the presence of food. This process was called classic conditioning.

William James

James was a philosopher and a psychologist who was influenced by Charles Darwin and promoted the idea of functionalism. His greatest legacy came from his writing and his Harvard teaching. He admitted a woman into his graduate seminar in 1890 and when all the men dropped out, he taught her alone.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist. He was the last century's most influential observer of children. He proposed the theory of Cognitive Development, which suggested that all children go through four stags in a fixed order.

Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in 2002. He studied econ sciences, judgement and decision making, behavioral economics, and hedonic psychology. He conducted research to discover factors that influence human judgement and decision making.

Levels of Analysis

Levels of analysis are the differing views for analyzing a given phenomenon. These views can range from biological to psychological to social-cultural. They offer complementary outlooks. For example, a horrific school shooting can be viewed as the shooter having genetic tendencies that cause them to be violent, or we living in a society that promotes guns and accepts violence.

Abraham Maslow

Like Carl Rogers, Maslow was also a leader of the humanistic psychologists group. He too rejected the 1960's definition of psychology, both Freudian psychology and behaviorism. He developed a theory of motivation known as the Hierarchy of Needs.

John Locke

Locke was a British political philosopher who lived from 1632-1704. He wrote the paper entitled "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." He argued that the mind is a tabula rasa, or a "blank slate," on which experiences write. This idea helped form the idea of empiricism.

Mean

Mean is the arithmatic average of a distribution of data. This is obtained by the total sum of all the scores divided by the number of scores. It is the most commonly reported measure of the measures of central tendency.

Median

Median is the middle score in a distribution of data. It is the midpoint, or the 50th percentile. Half of the scores are above the median and half of the scores are below the median.

Mode

Mode is the score or scores that occur the most frequently in a distribution of data. It is the simplest measure in the measures of central tendency.

Natural Selection

Natural selection is the evolutionary process proposed by Charles Darwin. It says that from among chance variations, nature selects traits that best enables an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. Those traits will then be passes on to succeeding generations.

Mamie Phipps Clark

Phipps Clark received her masters from Howard University. She decided to end racial segregation in public schools and wrote "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Preschool Children." She collaborated with Kenneth Clark.

Plato

Plato lived from 428-348 B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Like his teacher Socrates, Plato also became a philosopher and teacher; his student was Aristotle. Plato shared Socrates beliefs that the mind is separate from the body and continues after the body dies, and that knowledge is born within us. He derived principles by logic.

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders. Psychiatrists are medical doctors licensed to prescribe drugs and treat physical causes of psychological disorders. They can also provide psychotherapy.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Psychodynamic psychology is the study of how unconscious drives and conflicts influence behavior. That information is used to treat people with psychological disorders. A psychodynamic psychologist might view an action as an outlet for unconscious feelings. It evolved from Freud's psychoanalysis.

Psychometrics

Psychometrics is a branch of psychology and the study of the measurement of human abilities, attitudes, and traits. It designs, administers, and interprets quantitative tests to measure variables such as intelligence, aptitude, and personality.

James Randi

Randi was a magician who exemplified skepticism. He tested and debunked psychic phenomena and used the empirical approach on aura-seers.

Range

Range is the difference between the highest score and the lowest score in a distribution of data. This gap between the lowest and highest scores provides only a rough estimate of variation.

Rosalie Rayner

Rayner assisted John B. Watson in his demonstration of conditioned responses on a baby who became known as "Little Albert." They taught Albert to fear a white rat by making a loud sound every time he saw it. Rayner and Watson were romantically involved.

Replication

Replication is the repeating of a research study, but usually with different participates in different situations. This is to see whether the original finding extends to other participants and circumstances. If the results are similar, the findings are reliable.

Carl Rogers

Rogers was a leader of the humanistic psychologists group that rejected the current definition of psychology in the 1960's. He found that both Freudian psychology and behaviorism were too limiting. He created his own approach called the person-centered approach.

B.F. Skinner

Skinner, who is described as "equally provocative" as John B. Watson, shared many of the same beliefs as Watson. He too rejected introspections and instead studied how consequences shape behavior, a process called conditioning. He was a leading behaviorist.

Social Psychology

Social psychology is the study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another. Social psychologists explore how we view and affect one another.

Social-cultural Psychology

Social-cultural psychology is the study of how situations and cultures affect our behavior and thinking. It focuses on how behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures. A social-cultural psychologist might explore how expressions of feeling vary across cultural contexts.

Socrates

Socrates lived from 469-399 B.C.E. in ancient Greece. He was a philosopher and a teacher; he taught Plato. Together, they concluded that the mind is separate from the body and continues after the body dies. They also believed that knowledge is preexisting and innate, or born within us.

Standard Deviation

Standard deviation is the computed measure of how much scores vary around the mean score. It is a more useful standard for measuring how much scores deviate from one another than the range because it uses information from each score.

Structuralism

Structuralism is the idea that the structure of the human mind can be discovered through engaging people in self-reflective introspection. They would be trained to report elements of their experiences such as looking at a flower or listening to music. It was introduced by Edward Bradford Titchener.

Biopsychosocial Approach

The biopsychosocial approach is formed by integrating different levels of analysis. It considers the influences of biological, psychological, and social-cultural factors. Each level provides a valuable vantage point for looking at a behavior or mental process, but each level by itself is incomplete.

Control Group

The control group is the group in a n experiment that is not exposed to the treatment. It contrasts with the experimental group, which does receive the treatment, and it seres as a comparison for evaluating the effect of the treatment on the other group.

Nature vs Nurture Issue

The nature vs. nurture issue is the ancient debate over whether it is genes or experiences that contribute to the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today's science believes traits and behaviors come from the interaction of both nature and nurture.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is an experimental result which was caused by expectations alone. It is any effect on behavior caused by the administration of an inert substance or condition that the recipient assumes is an active agent.

Psychology

Today's definition of psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes. Behavior is any action an organism does that can be observed and recorded. Mental processes are the internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior, such as sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

Amos Tversky

Tversky collaborated with Kahneman. He concluded random sequences often don't look random; HTTHTH.

Margaret Floy Washburn

Washburn was the first female psychology Ph.D. and the second female APA president in 1921. She was also the author of the influential book "The Animal Mind." Her thesis was the first foreign study published in Wundt's journal, but because she was a woman, when war barred from joining the organizations of experimental psychologists.

John B. Watson

Watson, described as flamboyant and provocative, was an American psychologist who appeared in the 1920's. He dismissed introspection and instead said science is rooted in observation. Although sensations, feelings, and thoughts cannot be observed, people's behavior as they respond to different situations can be observed and recorded. He suggested that our behavior is influenced by learned associations, which is called conditioning.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt was a German professor who, with the help of two of his students, created an experimental apparatus which measured the time between people hearing a ball hit a platform and then pressing a telegraph key. This began the first psychological laboratory. He sought to measure the fastest and simplest mental processes, or the "atoms of the mind."